Love Song | Forugh Farrokhzad | Ali Salami

The night is painted by your dream

Your perfume fills my lungs to extreme

You are a feast for my eye!

All shapes of woe you belie

As the body of earth is washed by rain

From my soul you cleanse all stain!

In my burning body you are a turning gyre

In the shade of my eyelashes you are a blazing fire.

You are more verdant than a wheat field!

More fruit than golden boughs you yield!

To the suns you open the gate

To counteract dark doubt’s spate

With you there is no reason for fears

But the pain of joyful tears

This sad heart of mine and profuse light?

This din of life in the abyss of blight?

The glance in your eyes is my field

And with it my eyes are sealed

Before this I had no other image

Or I would not but you envisage

The pain of love is a dark pain

Going and demeaning oneself in vain

Leaning against people with black sight

Defiling oneself with the filth of spite

Finding in caresses venom of wile

Finding villainy in friend’s smile

Handing gold coins to the marauding band

Getting lost in the midst of the bazaar land

With my soul united you will be

From grave you will raise me

Like a star on wings decked with gold

You come from a land untold.

You alleviate sorrow’s pang

Flooding my body with embrace’s tang

You are a stream flowing onto my dry breast

My bed of my veins with your water is blest

Within a world which on darkness does feed

With every step you take I proceed

Underneath my skin you go!

There like blood you flow

Burning my tresses with a fondling hand

Flushing my cheeks with an urging demand

You are a stranger to my gown

An acquaintance with my body’s lawn

You are a shining sun that never dies

A sun that rises in Southern skies

You are fresher than first light

Fresher than spring, a lusher sight

This is no longer love; this is pride

A chandelier that in silence and darkness died

When Love did my heart entice

I was filled with a sense of sacrifice

This is no longer me, this is no longer me

My life with my ego amounted to a null degree

My lips your kisses prize

Your lips are the temple of my eyes

In me you stir a great rhapsody

Your curves are an attire on my body

O how I crave to sprout

And my joy with sorrow shout

O how I wish to rise

And my eyes with tears baptize

This forlorn heart of mine and incense perfume?

The music of harp and lyre in a prayer room?

This void and these flights?

These songs and these silent nights?

Your glance is a wondrous lullaby

Cradling restless babes thereby

Your breath is a trancing breeze

Washing off me tremors of unease

Finding in my morrows a place to sleep

Permeating my world deep and deep

In me the passion for poetry you inspire

Over my lays you cast instant fire

You kindled my passionate desire

Thus setting my poems afire.

©Ali Salami 2017

Another Birth | Forugh Farrokhzad | Ali Salami

My entire soul is a murky verse

Reiterating you within itself

Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings

In this verse, I sighed you, AH!

In this verse,

I grafted you to trees, water and fire

 

Perhaps life is

A long street along which a woman

With a basket passes every day

Perhaps life

Is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch

Perhaps life is a child returning home from school

Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette

Between the lethargic intervals of two lovemakings

Or the puzzled passage of a passerby

Tipping his hat

Saying good morning

to another passerby with a vacant smile

Perhaps life is that blocked moment

When my look destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes

And in this there is a sense

Which I will mingle with the perception of the moon

And the reception of darkness

 

In a room the size of one solitude

My heart

The size of one love

Looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness,

 

At the pretty withering of flowers in the flower pots

At the sapling you planted in our flowerbed

At the songs of the canaries

Who sing the size of one window.

 

Ah

This is my lot

This is my lot

My lot

Is a sky, which the dropping of a curtain seizes from me

My lot is going down an abandoned stairway

And joining with something in decay and nostalgia

My lot is a cheerless walk in the garden of memories

And dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:

“I love

Your hands”

 

I will plant my hands in the flowerbed

I will sprout, I know, I know, I know

And the sparrows will lay eggs

In the hollows of my inky fingers

I will hang a pair of earrings of red twin cherries

Round my ears

I will put dahlia petals on my nails

There is an alley

Where the boys who were once in love with me,

With those disheveled hairs, thin necks and gaunt legs

Still think of the innocent smiles of a little girl

Who was one night blown away by the wind

There is an alley which my heart

Has stolen from places of my childhood

 

The journey of a volume along the line of time

And impregnating the barren line of time with a volume

A volume conscious of an image

Returning from the feast of a mirror

 

This is the way

Someone dies

And someone remains

No fisherman will catch pearls

From a little stream flowing into a ditch

 

I

Know a sad little mermaid

Dwelling in the ocean

Softly, gently blowing

Her heart into a wooden flute

A sad little mermaid

Who dies with a kiss at night

And is born again with another kiss at dawn

©Ali Salami 2017